Unless you are designing a demountable temporary structure capable of erection on any site, then the nature of the site is one of the few constants in any architectural programme.
This demonstrates how aspects of a specific programmer can interact with a site to determine an optimum formal outcome. But exemplars have also conditioned architects’
responses to the site during this century; these have taken on extreme positions from
the archetypal Corbusianmodel where precise geometrical building form is set up in dramatic contrast to the landscape and where ‘pilotis’ allow the building to hover in
apparent detachment from the site, to an alternative modernist orthodoxy where a building’s
‘organic’ form is perceived as an outcrop of the site itself .
Analysis and survey
An understanding of the site and its potential suggests an analytical process before the business of designing can get under way. There are obvious physical characteristics like contour and climate, for example, which may stimulate the designer’s creative imagination but first it is imperative to comprehend the ‘sense of place’ which the site itself communicates. It is necessary therefore, to have some understanding of the locality, its history, its social structure and physical patterns or ‘grain’, so that the form and density of your proposed interventions are appropriate.
This whole question of an architect’s response to a specific site is best illustrated by
example . Here is a generous south facing sloping site with mature planting within a lush western suburb of Sheffield.
example . Here is a generous south facing sloping site with mature planting within a lush western suburb of Sheffield.
Dramatic distant views of the city are afforded to the south and a major road forms the site’s northern boundary together with vehicular and pedestrian links to local facilities. The local authority insists that all mature trees on site are retained. The initial steep gradient from the road makes vehicular penetration of the site impracticable and, in the event, undesirable, given its mature planting. The client’s needs appear to be even more demanding; he wishes to retire to this house with his wife and requires to live, eat and sleep at road level, that is, on an elevated plane to the north boundary.
Intervention
This demonstrates how aspects of a specific programmer can interact with a site to determine an optimum formal outcome. But exemplars have also conditioned architects’responses to the site during this century; these have taken on extreme positions from
the archetypal Corbusianmodel where precise geometrical building form is set up in dramatic contrast to the landscape and where ‘pilotis’ allow the building to hover in
apparent detachment from the site, to an alternative modernist orthodoxy where a building’s
‘organic’ form is perceived as an outcrop of the site itself .
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